The GIGABYTE AORUS GA-Z270X-Gaming 5 in Detail

The GIGABYTE AORUS GA-Z270X-Gaming 5 is a very well-featured ATX motherboard with Intel's
Z270 chipset offering compatibility with Intel's processors from the 6000 and 7000 series. This black-
themed board comes with three PCIe-x16 slots, of which one is connected with a full 16 lanes to
the chipset, while the others are connected electrically with four lanes respectively i.e eight total. For I/O
options and expansion cards the board comes with three further PCIe x1 slots and supports NVIDIA's SLI
and AMD's CrossFireX technology.

The motherboard provides DDR4 RAM compatibility over 4 DIMM slots in ultra-fast dual-channel mode.
The memory banks take up to 64 GB RAM and, depending on the processor installed, supports memory
clocks of either 2.133 MHz (with Skylake CPUs) or 2.400 MHz (with Kaby Lake CPUs). One of the
unique features of the GIGABYTE AORUS GA-Z270X-Gaming 5 is the Fusion RGB-LED lighting and a
header for RGB-LED strips.

In order to connect the very fastest data storage devices, the board comes with two M.2 slots for extreme
NVMe M.2 SSDs, as well as six SATA 6G ports for 3,5" or 2,5" hard drives and SSDs (including RAID
support). The M.2 ports are connected via four PCIe lanes on the 3.0 standard to the chipset and, in
combination with the NVMe protocol, enable a data transfer rate of almost 4 GB/s. This allows M.2 PCIe
SSDs to function up to eight times faster than SATA 6G SSDs!

The motherboard's I/O panel offers a new kind of USB port, USB Type C, which is particularly thin and
is finally able to be plugged in both ways. Besides the Type C port, the motherboards also provides
backwards compatible USB 3.1 Type A ports. USB 3.1 ports, with their maximum throughput at 10
GBit/s, twice as fast as previous USB 3.0 ports. As far as input devices and other gaming peripherals are
concerned, the I/O panel also offers four USB 3.0 ports and two USB 2.0 ports.

If no graphics card is present, the integrated GPU on the Skylake or Kaby Lake CPU allows for monitors
to be connected directly to the rear of the motherboard, HDMI and DisplayPort are available. Internally
the motherboard offers - among other functions - two USB 3.0 ports, a USB 2.0 header, a TMP header,
four 4-pin headers for PWM fans as well as XMP support and an array of overclocking features.